What is it with vice presidents of the United States when they visit college campuses and are asked almost anything about Israel? They end up as tongue-tied as Coldplay’s frontman, Chris Martin, at Wembley Stadium. He welcomed two Israeli teenage girls on stage and then succumbed to this brain freeze: “I am treating you as equal humans on earth, regardless of where you come from.”
The rock star mercifully decided to treat the girls as human beings even though, as Israelis, they were undeserving of Homo sapiens status.
When Kamala Harris, as vice president, visited George Mason University in 2021, a burqa-clad female railed against Israel’s “ethnic genocide and displacement of [her] people.” Harris replied, “Your voice, your perspective, your experience, your truth cannot be suppressed, and it must be heard.”
In 2024, while making a campaign stop at the University of Wisconsin, a male student heckled, “The billions of dollars in genocide you invested in.” As he was ushered out of the auditorium, she replied, “Listen, what he’s talking about, it’s real. It’s real. . .. [A]nd I respect his voice.”
So, on two separate occasions, Harris conceded on college campuses that it was both “true” and “real” that Israel was committing genocide against the Palestinian people—both before and after October 7, 2023. Furthermore, the United States should stop supplying military weapons to a democratic ally that happens to be fighting the same War on Terror that we joined after 9/11.
Would she have us stockpile Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis, instead?
Last week, at a Turning Point USA rally at the University of Mississippi, Vice President JD Vance entertained a question from a man wearing a “Make America Great Again” baseball cap and an “Ole Miss” hoodie. He said: “I’m a Christian man and I’m just confused why that there’s this notion that we might owe Israel something or that they’re our greatest ally or that we have to support this multi-hundred-billion-dollar foreign aid package to Israel to cover this — to quote Charlie Kirk, ethnic cleansing in Gaza. … [N]ot only does their religion not agree with ours but also openly supports the prosecution of ours.”
He received decent applause from a student body that knew even less than he did.
Where to start? A Christian should not support the only Jewish nation even though Christ was once a Jew and Israel painstakingly preserves all the holy sites where Christ once walked and preached?
The foreign aid package is approximately $3.3 billion each year, not “multi-hundred-billion dollars.” It represents less than five percent of America’s entire annual foreign aid. Israel purchases its weapons from American military defense contractors, based on Israeli technology. That means that aid to Israel supports America’s economy and its high tech defends America’s homeland.
Charlie Kirk never once accused Israel of genocide. Judaism may not agree that Jesus Christ is the Messiah, but Judeo-Christian values serve as bedrock principles of Western civilization and democratic liberalism. Islam, by contrast, is engaged in a forever war with Judaism and Christianity. Finally, in the United States, the solidarity between Christians and Jews is ironclad, but where, exactly, on Earth are Jews “prosecuting” Christians?
Judaism may not agree that Jesus Christ is the Messiah, but Judeo-Christian values serve as bedrock principles of Western civilization and democratic liberalism. Islam, by contrast, is engaged in a forever war with Judaism and Christianity.
Ole Miss needs to get this young man a tutor, and fast. And Vance could have dispatched the incoherent argument he was making quite easily.
Instead, the Vice President responded: “[W]hen the president of the United States says, ‘America First,’ that means he pursues the interests of Americans first. … Sometimes [Israel doesn’t] have similar interests to the United States.”
The implication is that the president forced Israel into accepting the Gaza Peace Plan—proving that Israel doesn’t control the United States. Indeed, Trump leveraged Israel to act against its own interest.
On the matter of Christianity and Judaism somehow being in conflict, Vance noted, “One thing I really, really care about is the preservation of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. … My attitude is if we can work with our friends in Israel to make sure that Christians have safe access to that site, that’s an obvious area of common interest.”
Apparently, that’s his best response to a blitz of falsehoods from a hooded student who was as brainless and Jew-hating as anyone from the Klan.
He could have said: “This administration believes that America First requires a strong Israel to serve as our military proxy in the region. Israel keeps America safe. We spend far more on other countries that do nothing to enhance our national security. As for the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, when Jordan occupied Jerusalem from 1948-67, the Arabs treated the church like a toilet.”
Such a response would have drawn a louder applause than the inane, ill-informed audience reaction that preceded it.
Chris Martin has a very fine melodic voice, but he’s a moron. Kamala Harris has an awful voice, but a knack for word salads. Composing intelligible sentences is a moonshot for them. Perhaps their inner antisemites get awakened, too.
Vance, however, has no excuse for what he failed to say. He is a Yale-educated lawyer and the author of the memoir “Hillbilly Elegy,” which dissected the social pathologies within America’s white rural communities. Public speaking—tapping into his facility with language—is his greatest asset. He surely knew how Secretary of State Marco Rubio, America’s Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, and Senators Ted Cruz, Tom Cotton, Lindsey Graham, and Jon Fetterman would have stridently defended Israel.
(Democrats, hopelessly, have no elected or appointed officials who know how to properly defend the Jewish state.)
If Vance chose to remain silent in such a large and televised public setting, then either he doesn’t believe Israel is an essential American ally, or he felt compelled to appease an audience partial to Christian pieties and anti-globalist protocols.
That MAGA demographic tends to take its isolationist, antisemitic cues from Tucker Carlson, who is a wildly enthusiastic Vance booster. A fringe movement within the Republican Party, they have neither the critical mass nor comparable electoral clout as the progressive left and their Islamist fellow travelers.
Last week Carlson welcomed insidious Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes to his podcast. They shamelessly basked in their mutual hatred of Jews—disguised as anti-Zionism. Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, the influential conservative think tank, took to social media to defend Carlson’s anti-Israel diatribes and association with Hitler apologists.
Last week Carlson welcomed insidious Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes to his podcast. They shamelessly basked in their mutual hatred of Jews—disguised as anti-Zionism.
Elsewhere, stepping up in Christian class, the Catholic Church’s Pope Leo condemned antisemitism and affirmed the Church’s religious duty to safeguard Jews from persecution. The occasion for such solidarity was the 60th anniversary of the Second Vatican Council—the Nostra Aetate, which mandated that blaming Jews for killing Christ was no longer gospel.
It’s best to pay attention to the Pope over the blasphemy of a Tucker Carlson fanboy. Vance should heed that advice.
Students poisoned by Marxist, Qatari-funded professors are already bad enough.
